Publisher's Summary

The tragic story of Robert Falcon Scott’s quest for the South Pole is brought to sparkling new life in this adventure novel.

It is one of the most famous quotes in the history of exploration: “I am just going outside. I may be some time.”

The story of how former cavalry officer Lawrence Oates came to deliver his brave last words, before walking bootless into a Antarctic blizzard so that Robert Falcon Scott and the other members of the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition might have a better chance of survival, is brilliantly reimagined in this epic novel based on fact. A hero of the Boer Wars, Oates joined Scott’s second journey to Antarctica with dreams of winning the race to the South Pole for England. But small mistakes and bad luck plagued the mission from the start, and when they finally reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, Oates and Scott were heartbroken to find that Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them there—by more than a month. Little did they know, things were about to get much, much worse.